Racial Justice and Housing Justice: Two American Illusions

Since Black Americans began flowing into U.S. cities, the pursuit of housing justice has been intertwined with the fight for racial justice. Discrimination in housing markets deprived Blacks of the ability to obtain homes in White neighborhoods and towns. The spaces they could occupy were more crowded, less safe, and less desirable along several other dimensions. Further, lending discrimination prohibited Blacks from building wealth and investing in their own neighborhoods while Whites gained mountains of wealth in a housing market that only went up. White supremacist tastes also governed the logic of housing markets, meaning not only Black neighborhoods were avoided but Black people being introduced to all-White neighborhoods sent property values into a tailspin. It is no longer spoken out loud (often), but it is generally accepted that Black people and spaces have negative value in housing markets. If that is controversial and debatable now, it certainly was not in the middle of the 20th century, when Whites escaped to the suburbs as the color line’s borders became porous.

The four books in this synthesis all engage with histories of housing injustice in the United States. Race plays a starring role in the books by Rodriguez, Slater, and Taylor and is always simmering just below the surface in Dawkins’s book. All four books have something to offer planners and planning educators and scholars. Planning students often demand that we teach them more about race and how planning can further racial justice. These books have more to say about the past than this latter question, but it is the rare student who knows these histories well enough to understand the solutions.

Just Housing, by Casey Dawkins, has the broadest scope and historical sweep, so I begin there. Dawkins seeks to better understand the implications of a common refrain from housing advocates that housing is a human right. Dawkins marshals the writings of key moral and political philosophers (such as John Rawls, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson) and the goals of housing movements during several key housing conflicts through U.S. history to determine whether this right is legitimate and, if so, what privileges and benefits flow from it. It is a critical exercise, not just to focus the strategies and rhetoric of housing advocates, but because U.S. housing policymaking is often pulled in too many directions. This policy apparatus staunchly defends property rights and seeks consistent growth in home values, yet simultaneously tries (with less effort) to make housing more affordable to those with less. It is hard enough to address these goals simultaneously, but we also try to use housing to send people up the socioeconomic ladder and pay close attention to whether housing development will overwhelm transportation systems, schools, and other public infrastructure. We try to do too much with housing policy and, as a result, we fail to do much of anything at all. Dawkins’s derivation of a right to housing is also a timely answer to the question: “What is housing (and housing policy) for?”

Dawkins argues that housing is necessary to perform the functions of social citizenship, and this necessitates a right to basic shelter. Importantly, he goes further, arguing that the principle of civic equality legitimates the need to address the vast housing inequality in this country. Dawkins’s rights-based framework for housing justice is much more specific in its origins and implications than advocates typically provide. Further, he provides a way to resolve tensions between these rights and property rights. Dawkins provides advocates with more sophisticated tools than they tend to employ, and I am hopeful that they can bring them to the table. Just Housing could also spur big conversations in graduate planning courses, as long as the students can get through the denser parts on political philosophy and academic concepts of justice.

Dawkins’s policy solution is a negative housing tax, which would be placed on housing consumption: property transactions and gains in housing wealth. Revenues would be redistributed to those who have the lowest incomes in the form of a guaranteed housing allowance. As noted, this is the only book of the four that is not squarely focused on race, and the racially neutral nature of his preferred solution is a limitation. The proposed tax would undoubtedly redistribute income toward racial minorities locked out of housing opportunities, but the other three books all provide ample justification to be concerned about racially neutral policies to further housing justice. Slater and Taylor would emphasize that this would do nothing to dismantle the racist logics of housing markets. Taylor would likely predict that this would unleash more predation from real estate interests on low-income people and racial minorities. Further, Rodriguez would emphasize that unlike public housing, the tax code is unlikely to provide a space for tenant organizing and seeking racial justice.

Slater’s book (Freedom to Discriminate) emphasizes the role of realtors, which became a powerful lobby in the early 20th century, in the legal justifications for excluding minorities (chiefly Blacks) from White neighborhoods. There are many histories of redlining and racially restrictive covenants that typically put the onus on the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), everyday discrimination of individual home buyers and sellers, and intimidation by groups of White homeowners. This is a notable shift in frame.

Slater begins his story in Los Angeles (CA) at the turn of the 20th century, when a young and fast-growing metropolis was finding its way to protect White interests. Slater argues forcefully that racial exclusion was virtually created out of whole cloth by pioneering realtors who saw a need to create local boards to govern rules of conduct and exclude the shadier elements from the trade. This gave birth to the Los Angeles Realty Board, which would help create the National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB). These bodies organized several aspects of real estate business, but perhaps none was more important than legitimating racial exclusion. Remarkably, the realtors convinced White home buyers and sellers (and judges and regulatory agencies) that stripping away property owners’ rights to sell to whom they choose was preferable, to protect the property values of the collective. The collectivist solution was restrictive racial covenants. As cities and suburbs grew, dotting the American landscape with Whites-only subdivisions, NAREB enshrined a logic that uniformity was essential to protect housing investments. An introduction of new races or anything other than a single-family home into a White subdivision would force property values to plummet. Slater convincingly shows that these claims had no basis in fact: indeed, the little existing social science of the time suggested that excluding non-Whites from neighborhoods was actually detrimental to property values because it reduced competition among buyers. Over time, the desirability for racial uniformity became baked into the logic of housing markets, in a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The book proceeds through the groundbreaking battles over fair housing in the 1960s and convincingly argues that the shifting frames of freedom promulgated by the realtors cast massive shadows over our politics today. Further, they have enshrined an idea that some—such as White homeowners—are more deserving of freedom than others. As Slater puts it, “The realtors’ most powerful contribution to modern conservative politics was an ideal of freedom that effectively prioritized the freedom of certain Americans without directly saying so” (p. 349).

I came to Slater’s book with considerable skepticism about the central role of realtors in creating segregated U.S. cities. Before reading, I placed the vast majority of blame on the everyday biases of White homeowners and federal and local policymakers, who created segregated neighborhoods as an inevitable backlash to the Great Migration. Although I still believe racial segregation was highly likely to occur in some form without the organized efforts of the real estate lobby, Slater convincingly shows that realtors made the pernicious connection between race and property values a reality by successfully convincing buyers, sellers, appraisers, loan officers, courts, and public agencies that protecting housing investments necessitated stripping individual property rights in favor of a collective property right to exclude. Non-White home seekers and their communities are still suffering from these logics. And we all suffer from the realtor-influenced conception of freedom that permeates our politics.

Slater is not an academic but writes a book of housing history that is meticulously sourced, fast moving, and well argued. His policy proposals are more about pushing back against the toxic conception of freedom that the realtors promulgated rather than providing a blueprint for housing justice. And the policy section is brief.

The remaining two books are more tightly focused on specific policies and illuminate histories of White supremacy and racial exclusion from the perspective of the Black home seeker. They are also intersectional texts that center the struggles and contributions of Black women in particular. In Race for Profit, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor hones in on the realtors and federal policymakers that star in Slater’s book but at the tail end of Slater’s story, when equal protection in housing was made law, if not reality. Taylor discusses the low-income homeownership programs created by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Act of 1968, the lesser-known of the two federal housing acts passed in that year. These programs were frequently used by Black women to purchase distressed properties in previously redlined and disadvantaged urban neighborhoods.

Taylor forcefully argues that HUD and the FHA opened the door for real estate actors to engage in what she calls “predatory inclusion.” Although previously excluded people were now able to buy homes, realtors, sellers, and mortgage brokers happily engaged in unscrupulous targeting of unsuspecting and unprotected buyers to sell them distressed assets at inflated prices, using loans with unfavorable terms. HUD and FHA guaranteed the loans and lenders made most of their money by closing, so even when borrowers defaulted, lenders profited. Further, HUD’s appraisers were very inexperienced, potentially under the influence of lenders, and unfamiliar with urban markets where aging housing hid many problems. It was utterly predictable that desperate home seekers with often rat-infested options in the rental market would sign on to these tenuous homeownership opportunities, be unable to keep up with repair or loan costs, and eventually default. When these homeowners and Congress came asking HUD about their lack of oversight, the homeowners—typically poor Black women, rarely a group with which America sympathizes—were blamed.

Race for Profit is a crucial story. Although there is a lot written about the FHA, that story typically ends before this book begins. The programs Taylor studies are an early example of what happens when exclusion becomes inclusion and foreshadows subprime crises in the late 1990s and 2000s. Taylor is clear that federal policy prioritized real estate and mortgage lender profits over the goals of safe and affordable housing for those who could not afford it. For Taylor, programs that try to balance these priorities are doomed to exploit those they serve.

Taylor’s book is already very well known, and although it studies a relatively narrow and short-lived program, she is very expansive about race and capitalism in housing markets more broadly. Students at various levels should be able to apply her arguments to many more housing policies than those directly under study in the book. Race for Profit is a sharp and provocative book that is very much worth reading and grappling with.

In Diverging Space for Deviants, Akira Drake Rodriguez traces the political history of public housing in Atlanta (GA). Atlanta is an ideal case study for at least three reasons: the country’s first public housing development was built in Atlanta, public housing demolition was more widespread in Atlanta than anywhere except Chicago (IL), and Atlanta is a majority Black and economically thriving city, often referred to as Black Mecca. Rodriguez emphasizes that since the first groundbreaking in 1935, public housing has catalyzed political activity, particularly for Black Atlantans who were long shut out of the formal democratic process. Public housing provided a physical location for Blacks (often women) to organize to protect the politically deviant public housing resident and further the causes of Black Atlantans.

Rodriguez covers the entirety of Atlanta’s public housing history to illuminate how tenant associations evolved to protect the interests of different groups. In the New Deal era, public housing tenant associations became a crucial base of Black political power but one dominated by men and that furthered the interests of traditional families. By the 1950s, Black women took leadership roles in these tenant associations and furthered the goals of even more “deviant” residents, such as single mothers, single individuals, and women. In the 1960s and 1970s, federal community development investment helped resident organizing and empowerment reach its zenith, combining with Black enfranchisement to turn Black Atlanta into a potent political bloc. In the 1980s, the neoliberal turn in housing began, while decaying public housing led tenant associations to focus more heavily on acute maintenance issues. Further, the more public housing became housing of last resort, for only the most low-income families, the less money the housing authority had for maintenance. Here, Rodriguez’s key thesis takes shape: With a radical decline in the number of public housing units, tenant association power evaporated. Housing vouchers may have some advantages over public housing, but monthly meetings of geographically dispersed housing voucher recipients are extremely rare. This speaks directly to Dawkins’s proposal: A negative housing tax would create a floor of housing consumption but potentially undermine tenant organizing as a power base. But if it solves the problem of housing insecurity, should we worry?

Rodriguez’s interrogation of Atlanta’s public housing politics has implications for other U.S. regions. She is very careful to only speak to her data, and I wished she would have said more about how things could or should have been different. But the book is relevant not only to those studying housing but also Black politics, Black feminism, and Atlanta and other majority Black places.

With the caveat that there is a fair amount of selection bias (by myself and the review editor) in this group of books, it is challenging to come away from them with much optimism about solving the persistent crisis of race in housing. This pessimism is justified not just by the size of the gap between Blacks and other groups in U.S. housing consumption and outcomes, but by the pervasive nature of White supremacy in American institutions and individual decision making. The books study real estate agents, progressive housing movements, market-driven solutions, public housing politics, redlining, programs meant to replace redlining, local governance, federal governance, and more. These books make clear that all of these mechanisms and institutions are responsible for the persistent devaluation of Black neighborhoods (and by implication, Black people) in our housing markets and outcomes. Realtors; federal, state, and local policymakers; home sellers; home buyers; appraisers; mortgage lenders; and landlords all erected a structure of White supremacy that feels near-impossible to dismantle. If everyone is at fault, fixes are not simple.

Pessimism is warranted, but despair is not. Despite the pervasive nature of racial discrimination in U.S. housing markets and policy, progress has been made and continues on. Black–White segregation has fallen virtually every decade since 1970. In Washington (DC), poverty rates in Black neighborhoods have fallen every decade since 1980. Despite the constraints on Black progress, many individuals and communities are thriving.

Taken together, these books have key ramifications for housing policy and research. Most notably, they highlight a growing need to better understand how to devise policy that will squarely attack racial disparities. Since the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, there has been a perpetual failure to address past wrongs through providing reparative benefits to groups that have been discriminated against in the past. But Taylor and Slater show that even attempts to open housing opportunities to these groups have failed spectacularly: The removal of racial restrictions is very much not the same as the removal of racially disparate impacts. Rodriguez and Taylor, meanwhile, both provide examples of the inherent failures that result from trying to provide housing opportunities without making racial justice an explicit goal. For both Slater and Taylor, realtors and the FHA have successfully baked the negative valuation of Black home seekers into the logic of housing markets. For Taylor, the racial logics of housing markets led her to deny the possibility that markets can ever do anything but increase Black disadvantage. Racial capitalism, for Taylor, is synonymous with capitalism.

I am skeptical of the swift end of racial logics in housing markets but even more skeptical that a market-dominated system of housing production and consumption will be replaced by something else in the United States, as I think Taylor would advocate. For that reason, where I see housing policy and research going specifically is to evaluate how we chip away at the outcomes and logics at the same time. For many years, we have known that we need to build more housing of all kinds in exclusionary areas. With slow but meaningful political progress toward holding exclusionary jurisdictions more accountable (e.g., Monkkonen et al., 2022), we are learning what planning and land use changes are necessary to increase housing options in these places and how to make it happen politically.

But barriers abound. Not only are exclusionary places economically and politically powerful, but potential allies to politically overwhelm them remain divided. Taylor provocatively argues that the disadvantaged Black ghetto was a necessary contrast to the White neighborhood marketed by developers and realtors, that “A ‘White housing market’ would have actually been unintelligible without its Black counterpart” (p. 11). I don’t necessarily think Taylor makes the strongest case for this, but the fortunes of segregated urban neighborhoods are undoubtedly influenced by exclusionary places in the same market. There is an ascendant pro-housing coalition that has had limited success convincing tenant associations and similar groups of this logic and of similar ways in which their interests are intertwined. These are new frontiers in advocacy and research.

An obvious counter to my pro-housing framework is that Slater and Taylor forcefully demonstrate the power of nefarious actors in housing markets. Slater and Taylor each describe racist and predatory actors and actions lurking in nearly every corner of the housing sector, and Taylor in particular makes a forceful case that nothing short of a radical overhaul of the rules and referees of the game will stop these predators from feasting. Housing scholars have not been very good at identifying the prevalence and role of predatory forces in real time. Advocates constantly point to illegal evictions and the harassment of the homeless (among other forms of predation), but academics rarely have data or much to say about these things. Researchers need to find better ways of assessing these claims. The extent to which we can rely on housing markets to provide for those with less hinges not just on the size of the subsidies we give, but on whether we can trust the millions of transactions that these subsidies support.

Biography

MICHAEL LENS is associate professor of urban planning and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studies housing affordability and segregation by income and race.